1NC Round 6 Framework A. Our interpretation is that the affirmative should have to instrumentally defend the institutional implementation of a topical plan. B. Violation – the aff doesn’t defend a plan. C. Best for fairness. 1. Plan focus is the only predictable way of affirming the resolution. Philosophical and theoretical concerns certainly play into the ways that policies are made, but the resolution only calls for us to defend and/or question political-institutional implementations of these kinds of concerns. 2. Plan focus is the only way to ensure a fair division of ground. The affirmative has the advantage of trying to solve the most heinous problems of the status quo—without plan focus, debates devolve into whether or not things like racism, sexism, classism, or homophobia are good or bad. While problems are often less contestable, solutions to these problems are—we can debate about whether or not a particular proposal will fix or worsen these problems and proffer our own solutions. D. Best for education: 1. Political is value to life—it is how originally solipsistic lives become incarnate and real to themselves. Arendt 1958 [Hannah, The Human Condition, pp. 196-199] The original, prephilosophic Greek remedy for this frailty had been the foundation of the polis. The polis, as it grew out of and remained rooted in the Greek pre-polis experience and estimate of what makes it worthwhile for men to live together (syzen), namely, the "sharing of words and deeds,"26 had a twofold function. First, it was intended to enable men to do permanently, albeit under certain restrictions, what otherwise had been possible only as an extraordinary and infrequent enterprise for which they had to leave their households. The polis was supposed to multiply the occasions to win "immortal fame," that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness. One, if not the chief, reason for the incredible development of gift and genius in Athens, as well as for the hardly less surprising swift decline of the city-state, was precisely that from beginning to end its foremost aim was to make the extraordinary an ordinary occurrence of everyday life. The second function of the polls, again closely connected with the hazards of action as experienced before its coming into being, was to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech; for the chances that a deed deserving fame would not be forgotten, that it actually would become "immortal," were not very good. Homer was not only a shining example of the poet's political function, and therefore the "educator of all Hellas"; the very fact that so great an enterprise as the Trojan War could have been forgotten without a poet to immortalize it several hundred years later offered only too good an example of what could happen to human greatness if it had nothing but poets to rely on for its permanence. We are not concerned here with the historical causes for the rise of the Greek city-state; what the Greeks themselves thought of it and its ralson d'etre, they have made unmistakably clear. The polis-—if we trust the famous guaranty that those who forced every sea and land to become the scene of their daring will not remain without witness and will need neither Homer nor anyone else who knows how words of Pericles in the Funeral Oration—gives a to turn words to praise them; without assistance from others, those who acted will be able to establish together the everlasting remembrance of their good and bad deeds, to inspire admiration in the present and in future ages.27 In other words, men's life together in the form of the polis seemed to assure that the most futile of human activities, action and speech, and the least tangible and most ephemeral of man-made "products," the deeds and stories which are their outcome, would become imperishable. The organization of the polis, physically secured by the wall around the city and physiognomically guaranteed by its laws—lest the succeeding generations change its identity beyond recognition is a kind of organized remembrance. It assures the mortal actor that his passing existence and fleeting greatness will never lack the reality that comes from being seen, being heard, and, generally, appearing before an audience of fellow men, who outside the polis could attend only the short duration of the performance and therefore needed Homer and "others of his craft" in order to be presented to those who were not there. According to this self-interpretation, the political realm rises directly out of acting together, the "sharing of words and deeds." Thus action not only has the most intimate relationship to the public part of the world common to us all, but is the one activity which constitutes it. It is as though the wall of the polis and the boundaries of the law were drawn around an already existing public space which, however, without such stabilizing protection could not endure, could not survive the moment of action and speech itself. Not historically, of course, but speaking metaphorically and theoretically, it is as though the men who returned from the Trojan War had wished to make permanent the space of action which had arisen from their deeds and sufferings, to prevent its perishing with their dispersal and return to their isolated homesteads. The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. "Wherever you go, you will be a polis": these famous words became not merely the watchword of Greek colonization, they expressed the conviction that action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly. This space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them—like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, like the laborer or craftsman prior to the modern age, the jobholder or businessman in our world—do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; "for what appears to all, this we call Being,"28 and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality.29 Cap K Capitalism racializes subjects to divide social groups - a race and experience based epistemology and theory of oppression breaks down the concept of class as an all encompassing theory of exploitation that is the only way to enable the unification of the proleteriat Zavarzadeh 3 (Mas’ud, “The Pedagogy of Totality” p.11-13, in “JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics”, Volume 23.1, http://www.jaconlinejournal.com/archives/vol23.1.html) The pedagogy of appearance focuses on cultural representation and the role of representation in constructing the represented. By centering teaching in the machinery of "representation,"it obliterates the objective. Reducing pedagogy to lessons in cultural semiotics, it makes "experience" of the pleasures of "depthless" surfaces the measure of reality and thus obscures the social relations of production that are the material conditions of that experience. However, "This 'lived' experience is not a given, given by a pure 'reality,' but the spontaneous 'lived experience' of ideology in its peculiar relationship to the real" (Althusser 223). The ideological value of the concept of "experience" in de-concep-ualizing pedagogy will perhaps become more clear in examining the way bourgeois radical pedagogues, such as Giroux, deploy experience as an instance of spontaneity to eviscerate class as an explanatory concept by which the social relations ofproperty are critiqued. In his Impure A ctsa book devoted to marginalizing explanatory concepts and popularizing "hybrids" and that, in effect, justifies political opportunism in pedagogy- Giroux repeats the claims of such other cultural phenomenologists as Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, and Robin Kelley that "class" is "lived through race" (28). Class, in other words, is an affect. He represents this affective view ofclass as epistemological resistance against class which, he claims, is a universal category that takes the "difference" ofrace out of class. As I have already epistemology is used in mainstream pedagogy as a cover for a reactionary class politics that does several things, as Giroux demonstrates. First, it segregates the "black" proletariat from the "white" proletariat and isolates both :from other "racial" prole- tariats. In doing so, Giroux's pedagogy carries out the political agenda argued, of capital - to pit one segment ofthe proletariat against the other and to tum the unity of the working class into contesting (race) "differences." Second, it rewrites the system of wage labor itself into a hybrid. Giroux's experience-ism obscures the systematicity of wage labor and argues that there is no capitalism operating with a single logic of exploitation. Instead, there are many, aleatory, ad hoc, local arrangements between employees and employers depending on the color of the worker not the laws ofmotion ofcapital. Third, it converts capitalism from an economic system based on the"exploitation" of humans by humans(wagelabor)- through the ownership ofthe means ofproduction-into an institution of cultural "oppression" based on "power." Fourth, since class is lived through race, it is not an objective fact (the relation of the worker to ownership ofthe means ofproduction) but a subjective experience. The experience of ("living") class through race, like all experiences, is contingent, aleatory, and indeterminate. Class (lived through the experi- ence of race) is thus reconstituted as contingent - an accident not a necessity of wage labor. Fifth, since capitalism is not a system but a series of ad hoc arrangements of exchange with various workers of diverse colors, it does not produce an objective binary class system but only cultural differences. One cannot, therefore, obtain objective knowledge of capitalism . There are, in short, no laws ofmotion ofcapital; there are only "experiences" ofwork influenced by one's color. Consequently, to say-as I have said-that capitalism is a regime ofexploitation is simply a totalitarian closure. We cannot know what capitalism is because, according to Giroux's logic, it is fraught with differences (ofrace) not the singularity of"surplus labor." In Giroux's pedagogy, there is no capital- ism ("totality"), only cultural effects of capitals without capitalism ("differences"). Giroux represents his gutting of class as a radical and groundbreaking notion that will lead to liberation ofthe oppressed. However, he never completes the logic of his argument because in the end it will de-ground his position and turn it into epistemological nonsense and political pantomime. Ifclass is a universal category that obliterates the difference of race, there is (on the basis of such a claim) no reason not to say that race is also a universal category because it obliterates the difference of sexuality (and other differences), which is, by the same logic, itself a universal category since it obliterates the difference of age (and other differences), which is itselfa universal category because it obliterates the difference of (dis)ability (and other differences), which is itselfa univer- sal category because it obliterates the difference of class (and other differences). In short, the social, in Giroux's pedagogy is a circle of oppressions, none of whose components can explain any structural relations; each simply absorbs the other ("class is actually lived through race," paraphrasing Giroux) and thus points back to itself as a local knowledge ofthe affective, difference, and contingency. Class explains race; it does not absorb it as an experience (see Butler, "Merely"), nor does i t reduce it to the contingencies o f ethnicities (Hall, "New") or urban performativities (Kelley, Yo '). To put it differently, since in this pluralism of oppressions each element cancels out the explanatory capacity of all others, the existing social relations are reaffirmed in a pragmatic balancing of differences. Nothing changes, everything is resignified. The classroom of experience reduces all concepts (which it marks as "grand narratives") to affects ("little stories") and, instead of explaining the social in order to change it, only "interprets" it as a profusion of differences. Teaching becomes an affirmation of the singularas-is; its lessons "save the honor of the name" (see Lyotard, Postmodern 82). Giroux's program is a mimesis ofthe logic of the ruling ideology: as in all pedagogies of affect, it redescribes the relation of the subject of knowledge with the world but leaves the world itselfintact byreifying the signs of"difference" (see Rorty, Contingency 53, 73). The subject, as I will discuss later in my analysis ofCary Nelson's radical pedagogy, feels differently about itself in a world that remains what it was. Giroux is putting forth a class-cleansing pedagogy: he erases class from teaching in the name ofepistemology ("totalization"). But as I have already argued, epistemology is not an issue for Giroux; it is an alibi for hollowing out from class its economic explanatory power. Epistemology in bourgeois pedagogy is class politics represented as "theory"-whose aim is to tum class into a cultural aleatory experience. In Giroux's phenomenological experientialism, lived experience is an excuse for advancing the cause of capital in a populist logic (respect for the ineluctable "experience" of the student) so that the student, the future worker, is trained as one who understands the world only through the sense-able - his own "unique" experience as black, white, or brown; man or woman; gay or straight - but never as a proletariat: a person who, regardless of race, sexuality, gender, age, or (dis)ability has to sell his or her labor power to capital in order to obtain subsistence wages in exchange. Experience, in Giroux's pedagogy, becomes a self-protecting "inside" that resists world-historical knowledge as an intrusion from "outside"; it thus valorizes ignorance as a mark of the authenticity and sovereignty ofthe subject-as independence and free choice. The affirmative sustains capitalism by denying the fluid nature of borders in claiming they can be separated from capitalism—only orthodox Marxism can solve the harms of the aff by recognizing structural inequality as the source of division DeFazio, professor @ the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, 02 [Kimberly, May/June, Red Critique, “Whither Borders?”, http://www.redcritique.org/MayJune02/whitherborders.htm] Until recently the leaders of big business couldn't boast enough about the new "borderless" economy—a post-national world of global prosperity in which capital, labor, goods and services circulate freely—and its limitless opportunities for travel, commerce, and communication. So borderless was this new world, these triumphalist narratives suggested, that like all identities the border between rich and poor worldwide was being blurred in a continuum of boundless consumption. As corporate consultant Kenichi Ohmae has argued, "as the 21st century approaches and as what I call the four 'I's'—industry, investment, individuals, and information—flow relatively unimpeded across national borders, the building-block concepts appropriate to a 19th-century, closed-country model of the world no longer hold" (The End of the Nation State vii). Borderlessness had become a code for the new global freedom. Yet with the emergence of the so-called war on terror, the borders have "returned" to the borderless economy, and "freedom" is being redefined. It appears that the Bush Administration is concerned with nothing other than securing US borders, tightening controls and channeling billions of dollars of public funds to new and already existing national security, police and intelligence departments. The borders, it seems, had become too "permeable". Suddenly we are told that the US borders are dangerously insecure, and the preservation of American freedom now lies in the suspension of virtually all democratic rights , including far-reaching new surveillance technologies to police all borders of the US, as a means of distinguishing "safe" immigrants from "dangerous" ones, "us" from "them", the "civilized" from the "barbarians". Immigrants are under attack not only in the US, but throughout Europe (or "Fortress Europe", as it has become known), where a number of far-right politicians have come to prominence on anti-immigrant policies, pulling with them to the right "new social democrats" such as Tony Blair. And in one of the most violent manifestations of bordering, Israel has begun constructing a physical barrier further imprisoning Palestinians behind a 12 mile long security fence, separating "peace-loving" Israelis from, as Israeli government official Effi Eitam put it recently, Palestinian "animals". The borderlessness of the new economy now appears as what it always was: a deadly farce, with freedom another name for the free market. For, it is not only the recent corporate scandals that have exposed the great economic crisis now shaking the foundations of society worldwide, but the actual decline of the living and working conditions of the vast majority of the world's people, more and more of whom are forced to live under increasingly desperate situations of poverty, hunger, illness, illiteracy and rampant destruction caused by imperialist wars—while a tiny global ruling elite accumulates ever more wealth and control over world resources. The borderless world, in short, was never without borders. It was always founded on the border of exploitation; that is, the relation between the propertyless and the property owners. Those who have only their labor to sell because they do not own the means of production on one side, and on the other those who own the means of production and therefore compel all who do not to work for them, in exchange for wages which represent only a fraction of the value actually produced. The "return" of the border since September 11 represents the exacerbation of the antagonism between labor and capital: an antagonism which exceeds all national borders. This relation between workers and owners is the fundamental "border" hidden beneath the euphoric rhetoric of borderlessness—a rhetoric that has found expression in the last decade not only in the managerial philosophy of corporate gurus and the third-way policies of US and European state officials, but in the high-theory idiom of postmodern "hybridity" and the more popular discourse of the Internet. Chicana/o studies embraces postmodernity’s emphasis on ambivalence and partiality—this mystifies social relations and makes a critique of capitalism impossible Gonzalez 4 [Marcial, “Historical Materialism and Chicana/o Cultural Studies,” Science & Society 68.2] In arguing that Chicana/o studies has been influenced by post- modernist theory, I am not declaring that all Chicana/o critics are postmodernists. Nor am I alleging that Chicana/o criticism has cate- gorically rejected all approaches to the study of literature that are not postmodernist. Rather, I make two claims. First, the interpre- tive methods employed in Chicana/o studies have been substantially informed by postmodernist theory. Second, despite its status as a form of social critique, postmodernist theory mystifies social relations and, consequently, limits rather than enhances the possibility for critical class consciousness. Presumably, few cultural critics would disagree with my first claim. José Saldívar, for example, encourages readers to consider "the effects of shifting critical paradigms in American Studies away from linear narratives of immigration, assimilation, and nationhood. Is it possible," he asks, "to imagine new cultural affilia- tions and negotiations in American studies more dialogically, in terms of multifaceted migrations across borders?" (J. Saldívar, 1997, 1). Similarly, as Renato Rosaldo explains, "a sea change in cultural stud- ies has eroded once-dominant conceptions of truth and objectivity. The truth of objectivism - absolute, universal, and timeless - has lost its monopoly status. It now competes, on more nearly equal terms, with the truths . . . embedded in local contexts, shaped by local in- terests and colored by local perceptions" (Rosaldo, 1989, 21). Addi- tionally, Rafael Pérez-Torres more pointedly exclaims, "postmodern- ism marks the end of teleological thinking in the secular sphere. The ideas of Project and Progress give way to positions of locality and negotiation, issues we have seen inform the discussion of contempo- rary Chicano politics" (Pérez-Torres, 1995, 14). These comments substantiate my first assertion that a methodological change has taken place in Chicana/o cultural studies in the direction of the postmodern. Disagreement, however, will likely surface in response to my second claim - that postmodernism mystifies rather than cri- tiques social relations. In anticipation of this disagreement, the rest of this essay is divided into three parts. In the first part, after briefly discussing the emergence of postmodernism as a cultural condition, I review two relevant works on the relation between postmodernism and Chicana/o literature: Rosaura Sanchez's essay, "Postmodernism and Chicano Literature," and Ellen McCracken's provocative study, New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. In the sec- ond part of the essay, I analyze the limitations of two postmodernist- inspired concepts - cultural schizophrenia and heterotopia - that have been employed by critics to explain ideological ambivalence in Chicana/o literature. Throughout this essay, I endeavor to put into practice a historical materialist criticism for the study of Chicana/o literature. In the final section, I outline some key aspects of this criti- cal approach. For the sake of clarity, it is important to distinguish postmodern- ism as a cultural condition from postmodernist theory. Far from being a mere illusion, postmodernism marks the emergence of an actual condition, characterized by extreme social fragmentation and differ- entiation, skepticism toward universal systems, a preference for local- ized politics as opposed to mass movements, and the depthlessness of aesthetic production. This condition, according to David Harvey, began to emerge around 1970 with the development of advanced manufacturing and marketing technologies, resulting in a more "flex- ible" system for managing financial services, markets and labor. These changes in turn produced new cultural values, beliefs and practices, consistent with the overall anarchy and irrationality of this new chaotic form of capitalist control. Harvey's analysis of postmodernity of- fers a way to understand its emergence from within a traditional base- superstructure model, where ideas, values, and ideologies can be traced back to social class contradictions within the mode of production. It must be pointed out, of course, that the shift to a "flexible" social mode has not affected all sectors of the working class equally. In Dancing With the Devil, José Limon explains that "industrialization and urbanization came to Texas" (Limón, 102) in the period that Harvey characterizes as the zenith of Fordism, specifically the post- World War II period. Yet, "Texas and its Mexican population experi- enced an 'uneven development,' a less than ideal version of the Fordist contract" {ibid.). In other words, Mexican immigrants in south Texas and other locations along the border working in agriculture and the service industries have never benefited from a "truce" between capi- tal and labor, nor from the kinds of concessions that may have been granted to workers in other industries. One might even consider the conditions for many immigrants and other unskilled minimum-wage (or lower) workers as pre-Fordist, and in some cases perhaps even pre- modern. For example, in a cultural anthropological study of Latino undocumented immigrants who enter the United States to work, Leo Chavez explains that many undocumented immigrants are drawn to northern San Diego County by the demand for labor in the strawberry, tomato and avocado fields, as well as in large nurseries and flower farms. Scattered throughout this area, workers live in temporary camps near the fields that they tend. . . . Workers set up makeshift sleeping shelters of plastic, cardboard, tar paper, discarded wood, and anything else that is at hand. These encampments can be found on hillsides covered by dense brush, and in canyons with pleasant-sounding names. . . . Even though they are just moments away from middle and upper- middle class neighborhoods and communities, they stand in stark contrast to the growing affluence of north San Diego County. These camps resemble the living conditions I have seen in Third World countries. (Chavez, 1992, 63.) Of course, not all Latino workers live under such dire circumstances, but the effects of the super-exploitation of Latino immigrants (espe- cially along the border) have left their mark on literary representa- tions of Chicana/ o social experiences historically. These experiences have been represented in part as ideological ambivalence - as the characterization of human subjects that vacillate between different languages, cultures, countries and classes, caught up in a state of perpetual betweenness, articulated through such concepts as "borderlands thinking." Postmodernist theory misinterprets literary ambivalence as a subversive force in itself, rather than analyzing this ambivalence as the product of capitalist exploitation. The logic of capitalism results in extinction through the creation of ecological catastrophe and violent imperialist wars that will turn nuclear Foster 5 [John Bellamy, Monthly Review, September, Vol. 57, Issue 4, “Naked Imperialism”, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0905jbf.htm] From the longer view offered by a historical-materialist critique of capitalism, the direction that would be taken by U.S. imperialism following the fall of the Soviet Union was never in doubt. Capitalism by its very logic is a globally expansive system. The contradiction between its transnational economic aspirations and the fact that politically it remains rooted in particular nation states is insurmountable for the system. Yet, ill-fated attempts by individual states to overcome this contradiction are just as much a part of its fundamental logic. In present world circumstances, when one capitalist state has a virtual monopoly of the means of destruction, the temptation for that state to attempt to seize full-spectrum dominance and to transform itself into the de facto global state governing the world economy is irresistible. As the noted Marxian philosopher István Mészáros observed in Socialism or Barbarism? (2001)—written, significantly, before George W. Bush became president: “[W]hat is at stake today is not the control of a particular part of the planet—no matter how large—putting at a disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals, but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military superpower, with all means—even the most extreme authoritarian and, if needed, violent military ones—at its disposal.” The unprecedented dangers of this new global disorder are revealed in the twin cataclysms to which the world is heading at present: nuclear proliferation and hence increased chances of the outbreak of nuclear war, and planetary ecological destruction. These are symbolized by the Bush administration’s refusal to sign the C omprehensive T est B an T reaty to limit nuclear weapons development and by its failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol as a first step in controlling global warming. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) Robert McNamara stated in an article entitled “Apocalypse Soon” in the May–June 2005 issue of Foreign Policy: “The United States has never endorsed the policy of ‘no first use,’ not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons—by the decision of one person, the president—against either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so.” The nation with the greatest conventional military force and the willingness to use it unilaterally to enlarge its global power is also the nation with the greatest nuclear force and the readiness to use it whenever it sees fit—setting the whole world on edge. The nation that contributes more to carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming than any other (representing approximately a quarter of the world’s total) has become the greatest obstacle to addressing global warming and the world’s growing environmental problems—raising the possibility of the collapse of civilization itself if present trends continue. The United States is seeking to exercise sovereign authority over the planet during a time of widening global crisis: economic stagnation, increasing polarization between the global rich and the global poor, weakening U.S. economic hegemony, growing nuclear threats, and deepening ecological decline. The result is a heightening of international instability. Other potential forces are emerging in the world, such as the European Community and China,that could eventually challenge U.S. power, regionally and even globally. Third world revolutions, far from ceasing, are beginning to gain momentum again, symbolized by Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chávez. U.S. attempts to tighten its imperial grip on the Middle East and its oil have had to cope with a fierce, seemingly unstoppable, Iraqi resistance, generating conditions of imperial overstretch. With the United States brandishing its nuclear arsenal and refusing to support international agreements on the control of such weapons, nuclear proliferation is continuing. New nations, such as North Korea, are entering or can be expected soon to enter the “nuclear club.” Terrorist blowback from imperialist wars in the third world is now a well-recognized reality, generating rising fear of further terrorist attacks in New York, London, and elsewhere. Such vast and overlapping historical contradictions, rooted in the combined and uneven development of the global capitalist economy along with the U.S. drive for planetary domination , foreshadow what is potentially the most dangerous period in the history of imperialism. The course on which U.S and world capitalism is now headed points to global barbarism—or worse. Yet it is important to remember that nothing in the development of human history is inevitable. There still remains an alternative path—the global struggle for a humane, egalitarian, democratic, and sustainable society. The classic name for such a society is “socialism.” Such a renewed struggle for a world of substantive human equality must begin by addressing the system’s weakest link and at the same time the world’s most pressing needs—by organizing a global resistance movement against the new naked imperialism. Class divisions are the root of all other oppressions Kovel 2 (Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, awarded Fellowship at the John Guggenheim Foundation, Joel, The Enemy of Nature, pages 123-124) If, however, we ask the question of efficacy, that is, which split sets the others into motion, then priority would have to be given to class, for the plain reason that class relations entail the state as an instrument of enforcement and control, and it is the state that shapes and organizes the splits that appear in human ecosystems. Thus class is both logically and historically distinct from other forms of exclusion (hence we should not talk of 'classism' to go along with 'sexism' and 'racism,' and `species-ism'). This is, first of all, because class is an essentially man-made category, without root in even a mystified biology. We cannot imagine a human world without gender distinctions – although we can imagine a world without domination by gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginable – indeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our species' time on earth, during all of which considerable fuss was made over gender. Historically, the difference arises because 'class' signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus whose conquests and regulations create races and shape gender relations. Thus there will be no true resolution of racism so long as class society stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies the activities of a class-defending state.'° Nor can gender inequality be enacted away so long as class society, with its state, demands the super-exploitation of woman's labour. Class society continually generates gender, racial, ethnic oppressions and the like, which take on a life of their own, as well as profoundly affecting the concrete relations of class itself. It follows that class politics must be fought out in terms of all the active forms of social splitting. It is the management of these divisions that keeps state society functional. Thus though each person in a class society is reduced from what s/he can become, the varied reductions can be combined into the great stratified regimes of history — this one becoming a fierce warrior, that one a routine-loving clerk, another a submissive seamstress, and so on, until we reach today's personifications of capital and captains of industry. Yet no matter how functional a class society, the profundity of its ecological violence ensures a basic antagonism which drives history onward. History is the history of class society — because no matter how modified, so powerful a schism is bound to work itself through to the surface, provoke resistance (`class struggle'), and lead to the succession of powers. The relation of class can be mystified without end — only consider the extent to which religion exists for just this purpose, or watch a show glorifying the police on television — yet so long as we have any respect for human nature, we must recognize that so fundamental an antagonism as would steal the vital force of one person for the enrichment of another cannot be conjured away. Vote negative to adopt the historical material criticism of the 1NC - historical analysis of the material conditions of capital is the only way to break free from is contradictions and social inequalities it causes Tumino 1 (Steven, teaches at the City University of New York, Spring, What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More Than Ever Before) Any effective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer an integrated understanding of social practices and, based on such an interrelated knowledge, offer a guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now, only Orthodox Marxism has been able to produce an integrated knowledge of the existing social totality and provide lines of praxis that will lead to building a society free from necessity. But first I must clarify what I mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political theory, the very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself contested—not just from non-and anti-Marxists who question the very "real" (by which they mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria) existence of any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I regard to be the distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing about a new society based not on human rights but on freedom from necessity. I will argue that to know contemporary society—and to be able to act on such knowledge—one has to first of all know what makes the existing social totality. I will argue that the dominant social totality is based on inequality—not just inequality of power but inequality of economic access (which then determines access to health care, education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ). This systematic inequality cannot be explained by gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or nationality. These are all secondary contradictions and are all determined by the fundamental contradiction of capitalism which is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All modes of Marxism now explain social inequalities primarily on the basis of these secondary contradictions and in doing so—and this is my main argument—legitimate capitalism. Why? Because such arguments authorize capitalism without gender, race, discrimination and thus accept economic inequality as an integral part of human societies. They accept a sunny capitalism—a capitalism beyond capitalism. Such a society, based on cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been the not-so-hidden agenda of the bourgeois left—whether it has been called "new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This is, by the way, the main reason for its popularity in the culture industry—from the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics (Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For all, capitalism is here to stay and the best that can be done is to make its cruelties more tolerable, more humane. This humanization (not eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism, feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such an understanding of social inequality is based on the fundamental understanding that the source of wealth is human knowledge and not human labor. That is, wealth is produced by the human mind and is thus free from the actual objective conditions that shape the historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox Marxism recognizes the historicity of labor and its primacy as the source of all human wealth. In this paper I argue that any emancipatory theory has to be founded on recognition of the priority of Marx's labor theory of value and not repeat the technological determinism of corporate theory ("knowledge work") that masquerades as social theory. Historical materialist understanding of the way that consciousness is shaped by social reality is key to negate the ideology of ambivalence and contradiction embraced by postmodernism. This is a prerequisite to transforming capitalist social relations and solving the aff because the reality of class conflict is the methodological dynamo of our times. Gonzalez 2004 [Marcial, “Historical Materialism and Chicana/o Cultural Studies,” Science & Society 68.2] I shall draw this essay to a close by proposing a historical materialist criticism for the study of Chicana/o literature. But to attempt comprehensive description of historical materialism in these short pages would be futile. I shall therefore briefly discuss six issues re- lated to First , historical materialism attempts to understand the dialecti- cal relation between the particularities of existence and the larger social frameworks that give them meaning. R. Saldivar, for example, puts this dialectical procedure in motion when he reads Chicana/o narratives not as the transparent replication of events, but as texts that imagine the "ways in which historical men and women live out their lives as class subjects," a project that involves "attaining a true knowledge of society as a whole" (R. Saldivar, 1990, 6). Dialectical criticism enables a comprehension of "society as a whole" through the "abstraction from specific real conditions, followed by systematic analysis, and then by successive reapproximations to the real, all made necessary because everyday experience catches only the delusive ap- pearance of things" (89). Second , as a dialectical system historical materialism comes into conflict with postmodernist theory. As Steven Best and Douglas Kellner point out, postmodernism not only promotes a skeptical view of his- tory and subjectivity, it "aggressively rejects dialectics" (Best and Kellner, 1991, 222) . They offer a lucid analysis of the tension between dialectics and postmodernism, arguing that dialectics "attempts to describe how concrete particulars are constituted by more general and abstract social forces, undertaking an analysis of particulars to illuminate these broader social forces [but] postmodern theory re- jects dialectics in principle . . . and thus is unable to conceptualize the dialectic of totalization and fragmentation" (223). Deleuze aptly encapsulates the postmodernist historical materialism that will serve as a starting point for better understanding the method I am proposing. attitude toward dialectics when he declares: "What I detested more than anything else was Hegelianism and the Dialectic" (Deleuze, 1977, 112). Without an understanding of the relation between universal processes and their local manifes- tations, postmodernism ends up producing a fetish of social fragmen- tation by privileging concepts such as "schizophrenia" to describe the ideal postmodern (non)-subject. Third , historical materialism affords avenues for understanding the complex categories of identity based on race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender, not as autonomous formations but as interconnected processes within the larger dynamics of social relations. This is what Stuart Hall has in mind when he characterizes the category of race as "the modality in which class is lived" (Hall, 1996, 55). Hall theo- rizes the thorny relation between these categories, recognizing the particularity and relative autonomy of race without jettisoning the causal character of class relations. From a similar perspective, Teresa Ebert argues "for a revolutionary understanding and engagement with historical materialism for feminism in postmodernity," and she does so "at a time when feminism, for the most part, has lost the revo- lutionary knowledges of historical materialism so necessary to under- stand the exploitative relations of labor and production and to trans- form them" (Ebert, 1996, xi). In adopting a theoretical model and argumentative approach similar to Ebert's, I would characterize my own method as an engagement with historical materialism for U. S. ethnic literary studies generally, and for Chicana/o literary studies in particular, and I propose this method at a time when literary and cultural studies in race and ethnicity "for the most part, [have] lost the revolutionary knowledges of historical materialism," succumbing instead to the epistemological and political limitations of method- ologies emerging from what Best and Kellner call "the postmodern turn." Fourth , the categories and concepts of historical materialism are not pre-established truths set in stone. To argue that dialectical criti- cism represents an absolute truth would amount to a contradiction in terms since such an argument would tend to reify the methodologi- cal approach. In a much cited passage, Georg Lukács argues, "orthodox Marxism . . . does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx's investigations. It is not the 'belief ' in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a 'sacred' book. ... It refers exclusively to method" (Lukács, 1971, 1). Similarly, Peter Knapp and Alan Spector explain, "dialectics is a way of looking at reality, not as a complex of ready-made 'things' but as a set of processes. The dialectical approach examines the ways that everything changes. A dialectical approach asks . . . How do [these changes] connect to the rest of the world? This concern with change and interrelation implies that dialectical analyses are usually historical" (Knapp and Spector, 1991, 264). Additionally, Alfred Sohn-Rethel argues that historical materialism should not be considered a "world view" or an empirical science about how the world operates; nor should it be assumed that historical ma- terialism possesses a predetermined set of laws requiring only that an astute Fifth , the goal of Marxism is not to correct faulty ideas but to negate them - to critique them, to transform them qualitatively. As Ebert argues, for instance, "ludic" postmodernism must be "critiqued" not simply because its theories about society and culture are faulty (even if they are in fact faulty), but because they function as ideol- ogy that correlates to real social contradictions. For a theory to be faulty implies that it can be corrected. The Marxist critique of post- modernism does not serve as an analytical corrective, but as an en- gagement that leads to a démystification of real contradictions. In a similar vein, Sohn-Rethel explains that the superiority of historical materialism over other methods of interpretation does not rest in the claim that it is capable of arriving at better or more correct analyses. The difference between Marxism and other methods cannot be mea- sured on a quantitative scale, where the various methods measure up as more or less correct. Finally (in an effort to synthesize the five points just outlined) , historical materialism should be considered a "methodological pos- tulate" (Sohn-Rethel, 1978, 189-204) that makes truth-claims about social existence, but only after a thorough critique of the concepts and ideas associated with that existence. As a "methodological pos- tulate," historical materialism stands opposed to unmediated reflec- tion theory, which can be considered a pseudo-materialist approach based on the premise that, because social existence determines con- sciousness, consciousness logically must reflect social existence. His- torical materialism agrees that social existence determines conscious- ness, but it holds that consciousness does not "reflect" social existence transparently. On the contrary, consciousness necessarily mystifies the social world because it functions not independently from social real- ity, as in unmediated reflection theory, but as an integral part of re- ality. In the same way that Marx showed how "capital is not a thing, but a social relation established by the instrumentality of things" (Marx, 1974, 766), Sohn-Rethel argues that the intellect is not "pure thought," but rather an abstraction of universal social relations, es- tablished concretely by the instrumentality of cognition. Further, the abstractions that take place in both commodity exchange and cogni- tion operate, at one level, to conceal social relations and, on another, as a "social synthesis" to maintain cohesion and stability within the mode of production out of which they emerge. Thus, for Sohn-Rethel, although existence produces "necessarily false consciousness," it is only through a critical study of this con- sciousness that the historical materialist arrives at a greater knowl- edge of social existence, as if attempting to solve a mystery entirely with clues that are intentionally designed to lead the investigator down a false trail. practitioner impose those laws from the outside on the object of study (Sohn-Rethel, 1978, 189-204). But even if the clues are false, the truth may be approxi- mated from the formal logic and content of the distortions them- selves. "Roughly," Sohn-Rethel argues, "the Marxist approach to his- torical reality can be understood as answering the question: what must the existential reality of society be like to necessitate such and such a form of consciousness?" (197). He adds: Thus, methodologically the subjectmatter of Marx's critique is not the his- torical reality of this or that form of social existence but, in the first instance, a particular mode of consciousness - namely, that of political economy; it is thoughts, not things. It is the concepts of "value," "capital," "profit," "rent," etc., as he found them defined and discussed in the writings of economists. He does not deal directly with realities, does not elaborate concepts of his own which, as "correct" ones, he would oppose to the "false" ones of the economists. His approach is characteristically different. It is an approach to reality, but by way of the "critique" of the historically given consciousness. (Sohn-Rethel, 1978, 195.) Following Sohn-Rethel's argument, a historical materialist critique of postmodernism and its influences on Chicana/o cultural studies should not be understood as a critique of social existence as such - even if the goal is to arrive at a better understanding of social exis- tence in order to develop more effective strategies for changing so- ciety. A Marxist critique of postmodernism should be viewed rather as a critique of ideas and theories that emerge from a particular his- torical reality, which we can now hypothesize as a politically unstable, economically chaotic, contradiction-ridden capitalist mode of pro- duction that must increasingly give the appearance of being stable in order to maintain cohesion - or, when the deception of instabil- ity no longer remains feasible, must make the instability and chaos appear natural and perhaps even progressive, as in the case of post- modernist thought. Historical materialism, then, does not begin with the premise that it possesses a more truthful account of social reality than does postmodernism; it claims only that the critique of the lat- ter by the former initiates a dialectical process through which social contradictions and other previously concealed truths about social existence become evident. In this essay I have argued that Chicana/o writers and critics hold much interest in explaining ideological ambivalence in both creative and critical works. Postmodernism, however, hinders rather than helps in these efforts because it celebrates the appearances and effects of fragmentation, rather than engaging in a critique of its causes - or rather than theorizing a viable response to alienation. From a Marxist perspective, ideological ambivalence reflects the symptoms of reification resulting from the individualizing and divisive needs of a capitalist mode of production. Thus, the ambivalence of Chicana/o literature represents real social contradictions, mediated in the com- plex nexus of author, reader, text and history. From this perspective, postmodernism's celebration of fragmentation coupled with its vicious attacks against the concept of totality reproduces its own reified con- dition. Despite this apparent paradox, Chicana/o cultural criticism nonetheless has turned in the direction of the postmodern. Post- modernist theory might be considered one of the most popular forms of "ideology critique" on the cultural studies market today, but to my mind postmodernism has become the ideology, not the critique. Historical materialism must come first - it predetermines consciousness and the very possibilities of reflective thinking Marx 1859 (Karl, a pretty important dude. “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: Preface” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm) JM >edited for gendered language< In the social production of their existence, [people] inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of [people] that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which [people] become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Case Opening the border for inclusion only masks other forms of exclusion- making immigrants even more hesitant to cross the border Motomura 07 (Hiroshi, Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, 2007, “Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States”, pg 13) This entire inquiry reflects my hope that national citizenship in the United States can be a viable context for a sense of belonging and for participation in civic, political, social, and economic life that is inclusive and respectful of all individuals. There are certainly other models of belonging, including transnational models that reflect a sense of belonging to more than one nation, and postnational models that think beyond national citizenship entirely. But the apparent inclusiveness of these other approaches to belonging can mask other modes of exclusion. If national citizenship matters less, ties of religion, race, class, and other groupings that are less cosmopolitan or democratic than national citizenship will matter even more than they do already. The result may be a world without national walls but also a world of a “thousand petty fortresses,” as political philosopher Michael Walzer once put it.10 Making national citizenship into an inclusive vehicle is not easy. It requires a welcome of immigrants— crystallized in the idea of Americans in waiting—that has faded from law and policy in the United States. Although this idea has weakened and is in danger of weakening further, it should be restored to prominent influence because it captures this basic truth: a sensible we/they line must reflect the understanding that many of them will become part of us. This understanding was the conceptual engine for integrating generations of immigrants—mostly those from Europe. With much of this understanding gone, we should not be surprised if more recent waves of immigrants, especially immigrants of color, seem more reluctant to cross the we/they line into American society. Recovering the lost story of immigrants as Americans in waiting is thus crucial not only to giving immigrants their due, but also to recovering the vision of our national future that is reflected in the phrase “a nation of immigrants”— that America is made up of immigrants, but still one nation. The state of international relations is a consequence of politics – the move to place ethics above politics hides the political constitution of the world, making effective changes of it impossible Mark F.N. Franke, University of Northern British Columbia, 2000, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 6, No. 3, p. 321-322 If critical inquiries into international politics offer any positive position, it is that ‘the world’ or ‘the international’ and any representations of these things are first and foremost the consequences of politics. Thus, while one ought to accept the fact that any approach to International Relations is already ethically situated, one need not accept ethics or the ethical as the conditions from which politics in the world ought to be understood or through which they arise. For example, Hugh C. Dyer is quite right to claim that ‘whatever facts are apprehended [in terms of International Relations] are apprehended as a consequence of normative influences’ (1997: 201). But it does not then follow that ‘political substance resides in values’ (Dyer, 1997: 202). Neither International Relations nor the world are themselves the grounds of politics. Rather, they are ways of framing politics of human life in terms of ethics, in terms that may allegedly make sense for humans so understood. My contention is that it is the conflict of ideas and actions in inter-human encounters that produces the possibility of world politics. Experiencing the way in which one’s views and actions are inhibited or even negated through contact and engagement with others produces the grounds under which a competition of views may seem necessary. And the most successful medium through which one’s own views may survive is one that can claim global validity. Even where persons may decide that competition is undesirable, it is only through a general subscription to some sort of universal concept that the experience of conflict may be avoided. In this case, all, willingly or through coercion, may agree to a fundamental sense of how things are in order to enjoy respective differences, as in the social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hence, all politics may be viewed as essentially a world politics, as politics involves constant efforts to world in one sense or another. But, paradoxically, critical inquiry must also take the position that there is no world in world politics, understood in whatever manner. Ethical obligations are tautological—the only coherent rubric is to maximize number of lives saved Greene 2010 – Associate Professor of the Social Sciences Department of Psychology Harvard University (Joshua, Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings, “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul”, www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~lchang/material/Evolutionary/Developmental/Greene-KantSoul.pdf) ¶ What turn-of-the-millennium science is telling us is that human moral judgment is not a pristine rational enterprise, that our moral judgments are driven by a hodgepodge of emotional dispositions, which themselves were shaped by a hodgepodge of evolutionary forces, both biological and cultural. Because of this, it is exceedingly unlikely that there is any rationally coherent normative moral theory that can accommodate our moral intuitions . Moreover, anyone who claims to have such a theory, or even part of one, almost certainly doesn't . Instead, what that person probably has is a moral rationalization.¶ It seems then, that we have somehow crossed the infamous "is"-"ought" divide. How did this happen? Didn't Hume (Hume, 1978) and Moore (Moore, 1966) warn us against trying to derive an "ought" from and "is?" How did we go from descriptive scientific theories concerning moral psychology to skepticism about a whole class of normative moral theories? The answer is that we did not, as Hume and Moore anticipated, attempt to derive an "ought" from and "is." That is, our method has been inductive rather than deductive. We have inferred on the basis of the available evidence that the phenomenon of rationalist deontological philosophy is best explained as a rationalization of evolved emotional intuition (Harman, 1977). ¶ Missing the Deontological Point I suspect that rationalist deontologists will remain unmoved by the arguments presented here. Instead, I suspect, they will insist that I have simply misunderstood what Kant and like-minded deontologists are all about . Deontology, they will say, isn't about this intuition or that intuition. It's not defined by its normative differences with consequentialism. Rather, deontology is about taking humanity seriously. Above all else, it's about respect for persons. It's about treating others as fellow rational creatures rather than as mere objects, about acting for reasons rational beings can share. And so on (Korsgaard, 1996a; Korsgaard, 1996b).This is, no doubt, how many deontologists see deontology. But this insider's view, as I've suggested, may be misleading . The problem, more specifically, is that it defines deontology in terms of values that are not distinctively deontological , though they may appear to be from the inside. Consider the following analogy with religion. When one asks a religious person to explain the essence of his religion, one often gets an answer like this: "It's about love, really. It's about looking out for other people, looking beyond oneself. It's about community, being part of something larger than oneself." This sort of answer accurately captures the phenomenology of many people's religion, but it's nevertheless inadequate for distinguishing religion from other things. This is because many, if not most, non-religious people aspire to love deeply, look out for other people, avoid self-absorption, have a sense of a community, and be connected to things larger than themselves. In other words, secular humanists and atheists can assent to most of what many religious people think religion is all about. From a secular humanist's point of view, in contrast, what's distinctive about religion is its commitment to the existence of supernatural entities as well as formal religious institutions and doctrines. And they're right. These things really do distinguish religious from non-religious practices, though they may appear to be secondary to many people operating from within a religious point of view. In the same way, I believe that most of the standard deontological/Kantian self-characterizatons fail to distinguish deontology from other approaches to ethics . (See also Kagan (Kagan, 1997, pp. 70-78.) on the difficulty of defining deontology.) It seems to me that consequentialists, as much as anyone else, have respect for persons , are against treating people as mere objects, wish to act for reasons that rational creatures can share , etc. A consequentialist respects other persons, and refrains from treating them as mere objects, by counting every person's well-being in the decision-making process . Likewise, a consequentialist attempts to act according to reasons that rational creatures can share by acting according to principles that give equal weight to everyone's interests , i.e. that are impartial. This is not to say that consequentialists and deontologists don't differ. They do. It's just that the real differences may not be what deontologists often take them to be. What, then, distinguishes deontology from other kinds of moral thought? A good strategy for answering this question is to start with concrete disagreements between deontologists and others (such as consequentialists) and then work backward in search of deeper principles. This is what I've attempted to do with the trolley and footbridge cases, and other instances in which deontologists and consequentialists disagree. If you ask a deontologically-minded person why it's wrong to push someone in front of speeding trolley in order to save five others, you will getcharacteristically deontological answers. Some will be tautological: "Because it's murder!" Others will be more sophisticated: "The ends don't justify the means." "You have to respect people's rights." But , as we know, these answers don't really explain anything, because if you give the same people (on different occasions) the trolley case or the loop case (See above), they'll make the opposite judgment , even though their initial explanation concerning the footbridge case applies equally well to one or both of these cases. Talk about rights, respect for persons, and reasons we can share are natural attempts to explain, in "cognitive" terms, what we feel when we find ourselves having emotionally driven intuitions that are odds with the cold calculus of consequentialism. Although these explanations are inevitably incomplete, there seems to be "something deeply right" about them because they give voice to powerful moral emotions . But, as with many religious people's accounts of what's essential to religion, they don't really explain what's distinctive about the philosophy in question. Only pragmatic philosophy can evade the logical harms of the K and still take action against great atrocities – We’re not committed to their slippery slope link args Rorty 2 (Richard, U Minn, http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/rorty.htm)JFS The most powerful reason for thinking that no such culture is possible is that seeing all criteria as no more than temporary resting-places, constructed by a community to facilitate its inquiries, seems morally humiliating. Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognise it when we see it again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form “There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.” This thought is hard to live with, as is Sartre’s remark: Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be as much as man has decided they are. This hard saying brings out what ties Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche, together- the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions. A postphilosophical culture, then, would be one in which men and women felt themselves alone, merely finite, with no links to something Beyond. On the pragmatist’s account, position was only a halfway stage in the development of such a culture-the progress toward, as Sartre puts it, doing without God. For positivism preserved a god in its notion of Science (and in its notion of “scientific philosophy”), the notion of a portion of culture where we touched something not ourselves, where we found Truth naked, relative to no description. The culture of positivism thus produced endless swings are merely ‘relative’ (or ‘emotive,’ or ‘subjective’)” and the view that bringing the “scientific method” to bear on questions of political and moral choice was the solution to all our problems. Pragmatism, by contrast, does not erect Science as an idol to fill the place once held by God. It views science as one genre of literature-or, put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries. Thus it sees ethics as neither more “relative” or “subjective” than scientific theory, nor as needing to be made “scientific.” Physics is a way of trying to cope with various bits of the universe; ethics is a matter of trying to cope of the pendulum between the view that “values with other bits. Mathematics helps physics do its job; literature and the arts help ethics do its. Some of these inquiries come up with propositions, some with narratives, some with paintings. The question of what propositions to assert, which pictures to look at, what narratives to listen to and comment on and retell, are all questions about what will help us get what we want (or about what we should want). No. The question of whether the pragmatist view of truth-that it is t a profitable topic-is itself true is thus a question about whether a post-Philosophical culture is a good thing to try for. It is not a question about what the word “true” means, nor about the requirements of an adequate philosophy of language, nor about whether the world “exists independently of our minds,” nor about whether the intuitions of our culture are captured in the pragmatists’ slogans. There is no way in which the issue between the pragmatist and his opponent can be tightened up and resolved according to criteria agreed to by both sides. This is one of those issues which puts everything up for grabs at once -where there is no point in trying to find agreement about “the data” or about what would count as deciding the question. But the messiness of the issue is not a reason for setting it aside. The issue between religion and secularism was no less messy, but it was important that it got decided as it did. 2NC Impact Capitalism reduces everything to market abstractions—negates value to life and justifies the extermination of devalued people Kovel 2 Professor of Social Studies at Bard, 02 (Joel, “The Enemy of Nature,” p140-141) The precondition of an ecologically rational attitude toward nature is the recognition that nature far surpasses us and has its own intrinsic value, irreducible to our practice. Thus we achieve differentiation from nature. It is in this light that we would approach the question of transforming practice ecologically — or, as we now recognize to be the same thing, dialectically. The monster that now bestrides the world was born of the conjugation of value and dominated labour. From the former arose the quantification of reality, and, with this, the loss of the differentiated recognition essential for ecosystemic integrity; from the latter emerged a kind of selfhood that could swim in these icy waters. From this standpoint one might call capitalism a ‘regime of the ego’, meaning that under its auspices a kind of estranged self emerges as the mode of capital’s reproduction. This self is not merely prideful the ordinary connotation of ‘egotistical’ — more fully, it is the ensemble of those relations that embody the domination of nature from one side, and, from the other, ensure the reproduction of capital. This ego is the latest version of the purified male principle, emerging aeons after the initial gendered domination became absorbed and rationalized as profitability and self-maximization (allowing suitable ‘powerwomen’ to join the dance). It is a pure culture of splitting and non-recognition: of itself, of the otherness of nature and of the nature of others. In terms of the preceding discussion, it is the elevation of the merely individual and isolated mind-as-ego into a reigning principle. ‘~ Capital produces egoic relations, which reproduce capital. The isolated selves of the capitalist order can choose to become personifications of capital, or may have the role thrust upon them. In either case, they embark upon a pattern of non-recognition mandated by the fact that the almighty dollar interposes itself between all elements of experience: all things in the world, all other persons, and between the self and its world: nothing really exists except in and through monetization. This set-up provides an ideal culture medium for the bacillus of competition and ruthless self-maximization. Because money is all that ‘counts’, a peculiar heartlessness characterizes capitalists, a tough-minded and cold abstraction that will sacrifice species, whole continents (viz. Africa) or inconvenient sub-sets of the population (viz. black urban males) who add too little to the great march of surplus value or may be seen as standing in its way. The presence of value screens out genuine fellow-feeling or compassion, replacing it with the calculus of profit-expansion. Never has a holocaust been carried out so impersonally. When the Nazis killed their victims, the crimes were accompanied Mestiza conciousness link Mestiza Consciousness’s tolerance for ambiguity forever separates it from dialectical materialism because it refuses negativity. Rather, it represents a conscious submission to cultural schizophrenia that plays into the hand of capital. Gonzalez 4 [Marcial, “Historical Materialism and Chicana/o Cultural Studies,” Science & Society 68.2] Consider, for example, Gloria Anzaldua's ground-breaking lit- erary-critical work, Borderlands/la frontera: The New Meztiza. With good reason, Borderlands has been considered both literature and cultural criticism. Indeed, the book reinforces the very concept of the "bor- derlands" through its own internal structure, consciously and boldly crossing the disciplinary division between literature and criticism. Here, I shall focus on the critical quality of Borderlands without los- ing sight of its literary features. Anzaldúa refers to cultural schizo- phrenia through her concept of "mental nepantilism, an Aztec word meaning torn between ways" (Anzaldúa, 1987, 78) . She argues that for mestizas "ambivalence from the clash of voices results in mental and emotional states of perplexity" and "internal strife results in insecurity and indecisiveness." She adds that the mestiza's "dual or multiple per- sonality is plagued by psychic restlessness." In describing this "restlessness," Anzaldúa writes, "me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio. Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan simultaneamente'' ["My head spins from contradictoriness. I am disoriented from all the voices that speak to me simultaneously" (my translation).] Anzaldúa brilliantly exposes the deeply conflicted character of the mestiza psyche, but does not make clear how "mental nepantilism" will help change the conditions that cause ideological ambivalence. She finds that mestizas - and, by implication, alienated subjects across racial and gender lines - can potentially escape alienation by embracing and remain- ing within an ideologically ambivalent consciousness, stating that "the new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. . . . She has a plural personality, she oper- ates in a pluralistic mode - nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned" (79). The lan- guage Anzaldúa uses to describe the mestiza's consciousness resembles the language of inclusion and pluralism, but it also reflects the influ- ence of cultural schizophrenia. This holds true despite the fact that Anzaldúa at times seems to be describing a dialectical process through which the sharpening of contradiction leads to a new qualitative con- dition. Speaking of how the mestiza comes to develop a "new con- sciousness," Anzaldúa explains that the mestiza can be jarred out of ambivalence by an intense, and often painful, emotional event which inverts or resolves the ambivalence. I'm not sure exactly how. The work takes place underground - subconsciously. . . . That focal point or fulcrum, that juncture where the mestiza stands, is where phenomena tend to collide. It is where the possibility of uniting all that is separate oc- curs. This assembly is not one where severed or separate pieces merely come together. Nor is it a balancing of opposing powers. In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. (Anzaldúa, 1987, 77-80.) In this passage, Anzaldúa describes how subjects achieve a peaceful state of mind by coping with ideological conflicts. The passage sounds dialectical, but as R. Saldivar points out, "a true dialectic necessar- ily involves us in negation. In a relationship between opposed terms, one annuls the other and lifts it up into a higher sphere of existence: development through opposition and conflict" (R. Saldivar, 8). Anzaldua's "mental nepantilism" has inspired critics and writers seek- ing to comprehend and explain alienation and ideological ambiva- lence, but the concept falls short of a "true dialectic": the conflicting aspects of consciousness have been neutralized and consolidated into a harmonious coexistence; there is no negation here, no elevation to a higher sphere of existence. Interestingly, critics who quote this passage tend to emphasize the mestiza's "tolerance for contradic- tions," her "tolerance for ambiguity," and her "pluralistic personal- ity" (G. Sanchez, 1993, 9; Rosaldo A2: Perm – Do Both (K Aff) You cannot permute a method – it strips out all of the conceptual theory that allows us both understand the world and to create a praxis to end oppression Tumino 1 [Stephen, Prof English at Pitt, ““What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than Ever”, Red Critique, p. online] Orthodox Marxism has become a test-case of the "radical" today. Yet, what passes for orthodoxy on the left—whether like Smith and Zizek they claim to support it, or, like Butler and Rorty they want to "achieve our country" by excluding it from "U.S. Intellectual life" ("On Left Conservatism"), is a parody of orthodoxy which hybridizes its central concepts and renders them into flexodox simulations. Yet, even in its very textuality, however, the orthodox is a resistance to the flexodox. Contrary to the common-sensical view of "orthodox" as "traditional" or "conformist" "opinions," is its other meaning: ortho-doxy not as flexodox "hybridity," but as "original" "ideas." "Original," not in the sense of epistemic "event," "authorial" originality and so forth, but, as in chemistry, in its opposition to "para," "meta," "post" and other ludic hybridities: thus "ortho" as resistance to the annotations that mystify the original ideas of Marxism and hybridize it for the "special interests" of various groups. The "original" ideas of Marxism are inseparable from their effect as "demystification" of ideology—for example the deployment of "class" that allows a demystification of daily life from the haze of consumption. Class is thus an "original idea" of Marxism in the sense that it cuts through the hype of cultural agency under capitalism and reveals how culture and consumption are tied to labor, the everyday determined by the workday: how the amount of time workers spend engaging in surplus-labor determines the amount of time they get for reproducing and cultivating their needs. Without changing this division of labor social change is impossible. Orthodoxy is a rejection of the ideological annotations: hence, on the one hand, the resistance to orthodoxy as "rigid" and "dogmatic" "determinism," and, on the other, its hybridization by the flexodox as the result of which it has become almost impossible today to read the original ideas of Marxism, such as "exploitation"; "surplus-value"; "class"; "class antagonism"; "class struggle"; "revolution"; "science" (i.e., objective knowledge); "ideology" (as "false consciousness"). Yet, it is these ideas alone that clarify the elemental truths through which theory ceases to be a gray activism of tropes, desire and affect, and becomes, instead, a red, revolutionary guide to praxis for a new society freed from exploitation and injustice. Marx's original scientific discovery was his labor theory of value. Marx's labor theory of value is an elemental truth of Orthodox Marxism that is rejected by the flexodox left as the central dogmatism of a "totalitarian" Marxism. It is only Marx's labor theory of value, however, that exposes the mystification of the wages system that disguises exploitation as a "fair exchange" between capital and labor and reveals the truth about this relation as one of exploitation. Only Orthodox Marxism explains how what the workers sell to the capitalist is not labor, a commodity like any other whose price is determined by fluctuations in supply and demand, but their labor-power—their ability to labor in a system which has systematically "freed" them from the means of production so they are forced to work or starve—whose value is determined by the amount of time socially necessary to reproduce it daily. The value of labor-power is equivalent to the value of wages workers consume daily in the form of commodities that keep them alive to be exploited tomorrow. Given the technical composition of production today this amount of time is a slight fraction of the workday the majority of which workers spend producing surplus-value over and above their needs. The surplusvalue is what is pocketed by the capitalists in the form of profit when the commodities are sold. Class is the antagonistic division thus established between the exploited and their exploiters. Without Marx's labor theory of value one could only contest the after effects of this outright theft of social labor-power rather than its cause lying in the private ownership of production. The flexodox rejection of the labor theory of value as the "dogmatic" core of a totalitarian Marxism therefore is a not so subtle rejection of the principled defense of the (scientific) knowledge workers need for their emancipation from exploitation because only the labor theory of value exposes the opportunism of knowledges (ideology) that occult this exploitation. Without the labor theory of value socialism would only be a moral dogma that appeals to the sentiments of "fairness" and "equality" for a "just" distribution of the social wealth that does the work of capital by naturalizing the exploitation of labor under capitalism giving it an acceptable "human face." The permutation is severance – it severs out of the methodology of capitalism rooted in the 1AC. This a voting issue because it creates a moving target that steals neg ground a makes it impossible to debate. Ethics DA – We have ethical obligation to repudiate capitalism – this means any risk a link is a reason to reject the permutation Marsh 95 (James, Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, “Critique, Action, Liberation” p. 334335) An example from the sphere of personal morality should make the difference clear. When a friend, relative, teacher, or minister counsels an alcoholic to confront her habit, she is not making a prediction. Indeed it may seem unlikely, given this particular person’s past history, that she will lick her habit. Nonetheless, the moral obligation to get over her habit remains. Similarly, an obligation exists to get over our capitalism as a social equivalent of drunkenness. If the argument of this chapter is correct, we cannot renounce such an attempt at transcendence without giving up on the ethical project or curtailing that project by confining it to the sphere of intimate, interpersonal relations. I am a good father or husband or lover in my private life, but i remain exploitative, cruel, and inhumane in my public, capitalistic life. Such ethical renunciation or curtailment is the death or mutilation of the human; denial of utopia is a living death. Ideologies of scientific elitism, therefore, as they function in capitalist society are correct if there is no such thing as ethical, constitutive reason operating in community. If such constitutive reason is possible and actual in human beings as human in community, then scientific elitism is false. Men and women acting democratically and participatively do have a capacity to understand themselves and their lives in a way that is cogent and in touch with reality. Indeed, many of the popular movements in Europe, England, and the United States in the last twenty years such as feminism, environmentalism, civil rights, and antiwar movements, often acting against the advice or opinion of experts have shown themselves to be right and effective. In the Vietnam War, for example, millions of people in the united states taking to the streets in protest proved the “best and the brightest” in the white house, pentagon, and state department wrong. The “best and the brightest” according to the standards of scientific elitism proved to be deluded. The presence of an ethical, political rationality in all of us as human invalidates scientific elitism at its core. As I am arguing it here, a fundamental link exists among dialectical phenomenology, ethical, constitutive rationality, and democracy. Philosophy and ethics, properly understood, are antielitist. To think in a utopian manner, then, about community and socialism is to free ourselves from the excessive hold that science and technology exert over our minds and imaginations. We begin to see that science and technology and expertise, even though they are legitimate within their proper domains, do not exhaust or monopolize the definition of reason and other forms of reason and knowledge that are more informative, profound, and fundamental, indeed, compared to certain expressions of art or ethics or philosophy or religion, science and technology are relatively superficial. What revelatory power does a scientific equation have compared to Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech? What does an empirical of human populations show me about human life compared to the insight of Marx’s capital? What can a factual study of war show about its horrors compared to Picasso’s Guernica? To the extend, therefore, that science and technology dominate in the twentieth century as not only the highest forms of reason by the only forms of reason, they shove other, more profound, more reflective, more fundamental forms of reason to the side and twentieth-century industrial society emerges as an inverted, topsy-turvy, absurd world. What seems normal, factural, rational, and sane in such a world is in fact abnormal, apparent, irrational, and absurd. We begin to suspect and see that science and technology appear as the highest and only forms of reason because capitalism has appropriated science and technology for its own ends as productive force and ideology. In science and technology capitalism has found the forms of rationality most appropriate for itself, perfectly manifesting it, mirroring it, and justifying it. In such an absurd, inverted topsy-turvy world, fidelity to the life of reason demands critique, resistance, and revolutionary transcendence. One has to pierce the veil of such a world, see through it as absurd rather than accepting it as normal and sane. The prevailing rationality is profoundly irrational. DeFazio The aff gets coopted: the elimination of physical barriers only upholds capitalism by increasing competition for labor while failing to eliminate social and economic division which is the true limit to social mobility DeFazio, professor @ the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, 02 [Kimberly, May/June, Red Critique, “Whither Borders?”, http://www.redcritique.org/MayJune02/whitherborders.htm] If it were really the "universal" interests of the "host nation" that immigration policies work to serve, and not big business, all members of the nation would see their living and working conditions improve. Instead, in all nations, the conditions of the majority of working people have drastically deteriorated, while corporate profits have skyrocketed. If immigration (and the permeability of borders) were really used to benefit all members of the national population "immigration" would be used to ensure all people had adequate resources to meet all their needs, rather than pit workers against one another to compete for disappearing jobs with dwindling wages and dwindling basic resources such as water and medicine. In spite of capitalist ideologues' best efforts at constructing imaginary borders, it is, increasingly, the class position of workers everywhere—their lack of access to the means of production and, as a result, the increasing lack of access to all other social resources necessary to survive—that is becoming clear: not their "national" insecurity but their material insecurity. The ruling classes, in short, are proving daily their utter incapacity to actually secure the material conditions of citizens, even while they attempt to divert all attention onto matters of national insecurity. Conciousness raising Privileging discourse and ideas guarantees mystifying the material conditions that cause class oppression – only a return to material criticism can confront the material oppression of global capitalism Zavarzadeh 3 (Mas’ud, “The Pedagogy of Totality” p.3-4, in “JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics”, Volume 23.1, http://www.jaconlinejournal.com/archives/vol23.1.html) Berube's lesson obscures this CIA which is an extension of U.S. corporations and whose task is to wage a clandestine class war against the working people of the world to keep the world safe for U.s. investment. There is no hint in his teaching of the event that the CIA's actions might be symptoms of the systematic aggression of market forces against the workers and that the event might be an outcome ofmarket forces. In his teaching, the CIA becomes a story machine producing absorbing stories that circle around personalities, places, and actions but lead nowhere. They build an illusion of knowing. Analysis ofthe economic role ofthe CIA (which produces material knowledge of global relations) is obstructed by details that have no analytical effect. Why, for instance, did the CIA fight to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan? Berube's "waging the cold war" seems to imply that the dynamic of the conflict is "ideology." The U.S. and the Soviets simply had two different "political" systems and cultures. Thus, in Berube's version ofhistory, it is natural that the CIA wanted to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan and increase the U.S.'s sphere of political and cultural power in the region. The conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States is, in other words, a clash of ideas. Underlining his pedagogy is, in other words, a view of history as an expansionism of "power" (see Hardt and Negri) and as conflicts of "ideologies" (see Fukuyama). It is based on the notion that "discourse" and "ideas" shape the world since, ultimately, history itself is the discursive journey ofthe Soul toward a cultural and spiritual resolution of material contradictions. This theory mystifies history by displacing "class" (labor) with "ideas" and "discourse," and it consequently produces world history as a "clash of civilizations" that rewrites the world in the interest of the Euroamerican capitalism (see Huntington). According to the clash theory (which is the most popular interpretive axis o f 9/ 11), people do what they do because of their "culture" not because they exploit the labor of others (and live in comfort), or because their labor is exploited by others (and therefore they live in abj ect poverty). The event, in other words, is an instance of the clash of civilizations: culture ("values," "language," "religion," the "affective") did it. "They" hate "our" way of life ("Their 'values' clash with our 'values"'). Since "values" are transhistorical, the clash is spiritual, not material. But culture, didn't do it. Contrary to contemporary dogma (seeHall,"Central- ity"), culture is not autonomous; it is the bearer of economic interests . Cultural values are, to be clear, inversive: they are a spiritualization of material interests. Culture cannot solve the contradictions that develop at the point of production; it merely suspends them. Material contradictions can be solved only materially - namely, by the class struggles that would end the global regime of wage labor. The event is an unfolding of a material contradiction not a clash of civilizations. If teaching the event does not at least raise the possibility of a class understanding of it, the teaching is not pedagogy; it is ideology (as I outline it later in this essay). 1NR Historical materialism must come first - it predetermines consciousness and the very possibilities of reflective thinking Marx 1859 (Karl, a pretty important dude. “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: Preface” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm) JM >edited for gendered language< In the social production of their existence, [people] inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of [people] that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which [people] become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. Their own evidence proves that immigration problematization is understood through a lens of capitalism. They have it backwards. Ackerman & Furman 13 (Alissa, Ph.D., Criminology & Deviance, The City University of New York (CUNY), Rich, Ph.D., Social Welfare, Yeshiva University. “The criminalization of immigration and the privatization of the immigration detention: implications for justice”, Contemporary Justice Review, 16(2), 2013)IAA The construction of immigration as a public problem¶ Throughout the history of the USA, immigration has been variably problematized, depending upon the social and economic context of the time. The problematization of immigration has hardly been a random act by random social forces, but instead is shaped by nativist forces and actors who construct the immigrant as the cause of social ills within the American context (Jacobson, 2008). Understanding how public problems are formed is essential to understanding the problematization of immigra- tion and the i mmigration detention phenomenon . Gusfield (1981) presents a valu- able means of understanding the various factors that influence public policy formation.¶ In his seminal work on the nature of public problems, Gusfield notes several key issues in exploring how problems are conceptualized. First, he notes that it is essential to understand what institutions and/or organizations benefit from the¶ ¶ conceptualization. He also notes the key place of the notion of responsibility in the definition and resolution of the ‘problem.’ That is, responsibility has two meanings: the first being who is responsible for causing the problem, the second is identifying who is responsible for solving the problem. In the case of immigration, the way in which each of these notions of responsibility are constructed and ‘owned’ shape the way immigration as a ‘problem’ has lead to its criminalization. State policy makers and the prison industrial complex have each become powerful forces in the shaping of the nature of the construction of the ‘problem’ and how it is resolved. Addition- ally, the phenomenon of privatization creates a powerful opportunity for the social construction of the undocumented immigrant into a powerful potential source of revenue for forprofit corporations. Second ev also proves our point – proves it’s needed for revenue. They have no reverse casual evidence. Ackerman & Furman 13 (Alissa, Ph.D., Criminology & Deviance, The City University of New York (CUNY), Rich, Ph.D., Social Welfare, Yeshiva University. “The criminalization of immigration and the privatization of the immigration detention: implications for justice”, Contemporary Justice Review, 16(2), 2013)IAA In a recent NPR investigation, Sullivan (2010b) found that CCA executives believed that immigration detention would bring an increase in revenues from ICE. Other private prison companies have stated this as a business plan as well. ALEC, members of state legislatures, and individuals from these private prison companies met and drafted model legislation related to immigrant detention (Sullivan, 2010a). Soon after the drafting of this legislation, Arizona’s SB 1070 was introduced. According to Sullivan, ALEC and CCA played a crucial role in the drafting of the bill. Thirty-six Arizona state legislators co-sponsored the bill and of those, 30 received some form of donation or contribution from a private prison company and 24 were members of ALEC (Sullivan, 2010a). The legislation drafted at the ALEC meeting, became SB 1070 almost verbatim.¶ Not only did members of the state legislature have connections to private prison corporations, so too did Jan Brewer, Arizona’s governor. It has been reported that two of Brewer’s top advisers were former lobbyists for private prison companies. Sullivan (2010b) conducted a review of the states that have adopted or are consider- ing adopted Arizona-like immigration law. From this review, it is apparent that many state lawmakers who have crafted immigration bills are members of ALEC, with five legislators from these states being in the room when the original bill was drafted. As recently as two years ago, Sullivan (2010a) reported that during a con- ference call to investors, when asked about immigration legislation, the CEO of The GEO Group stated, ‘… those people coming across the border and getting caught are going to have to be detained and that for me, at least I think, there's going to be enhanced opportunities for what we do’. As states attempt to decrease their prison populations, private prison companies must seek revenue elsewhere. The CEO of the GEO Group candidly implied, immigrant detention is as good a venture as any.¶ The inevitable crisis of capital will spur totalitarianism – only the emergence of the alternative can head this off Mezaros 95 (Istavan, Prof Emeritus at University of Sussex, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, p. 140) In view of the fact that the most intractable of the global capital system’s contradictions is the one between the internal unrestrainability of its economic constituents and the now inescapable necessity of introducing major restraints, any hope for finding a way out of this vicious circle under the circumstances marked by the activation of capital’s absolute limits must be vested in the political dimension of the system. Thus, in the light of recent legislative measures which already point in this direction, there can be no doubt that the full power of the state will be activated to serve the end of squaring capital’s vicious circle, even if it means subjecting all potential dissent to extreme authoritarian constraints. Equally there can be no doubt that whether or not such a remedial action (in conformity to the global capital system’s structural limits) will be successfully pursued, despite its obvious authoritarian character and destructiveness, will depend on the working class’s ability or failure to radically rearticulate the socialist movement as a truly international enterprise. In any event, what makes matters particularly serious is the fact that the far-reaching issues themselves which confront humankind at the present stage of historical development cannot be avoided either by the ruling capital system or by any alternative to it. Although, as a matter of historical contingency, they have arisen from the activation of capital’s absolute limits, they cannot be conveniently bypassed, nor their gravity wished out of existence. On the contrary, they remain the overriding requirement of all-embracing remedial action in the reproductive practices of humankind for as long as the vicious circle of capital’s present-day historical contingency is not irretrievably consigned to the past. Indeed, paradoxically, the ability to meet in a sustainable way the absolute historical challenge that had arisen from the perverse historical contingencies and contradictions of the capital system constitutes the measure of viability of any social metabolic alternative to the ruling order. Consequently, the struggle to overcome the threatening absolute limits of the capital system is bound to determine the historical agenda for the foreseeable future. Historical materialism is the best methodology for understanding and fighting capitalit recognizes that capitalism is not inevitable, overcomes the depoliticized nature of economics, and opens space for solidarity and human agency Holmstrom 97 (Nancy, Professor Emeritus Department of Philosophy at Rutgers, Renewing Historical Materialism, Solidarity, http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2198) Wood's interpretation of historical materialism has been pejoratively labeled "Political Marxism," but she is happy to appropriate the label. For she argues that Marx revealed what had been concealed by economists, that the essence of capitalist production is political in that it rests on the relations of power between those who own the means of production and those who do not. Political Marxism presents relations of production "in their political aspect, that aspect in which they are actually contested, as relations of domination . . . as the power to organize and govern production and appropriation . . . the object of this theoretical stance is practical, to illuminate the terrain of struggle by viewing modes of production not as abstract structures but as they actually confront people who must act in relation to them." (25) Thus Wood's stress (and Marx's) on politics and class struggle in historical explanation is not counterposed to a stress on the mode of production or the economic, but rather intends to reveal how deeply social and political these are. Wood aims to restore this insight to the center of historical and social analyses where it belongs. Most historians and social scientists have missed this point. Wood suggests that one important source of the prevalent defeatist sense that nothing other than capitalism is possible, is the idea that capitalism has always existed, which she shows to be implicit in many theories of history. Weber, for example, uses "the Protestant ethic" to explain the origins of capitalism, but unless a society is already a generalized market society and workers are already subordinated to capital, this ethic will not lead to the productivity and profit maximization characteristic of capitalism. So Weber's explanation begs the question of how capitalism comes into existence. Some Marxist theories of history make the same mistake. For example, John Roemer assumes that capitalism already existed "as an option" within feudalism, thereby, like Weber, begging the question of how capitalism came into being. In contrast to such theories, Wood cites approvingly Robert Brenner's work as stressing the specificity of each mode of production and looking to explain the transition to capitalism in terms of the dynamics, contradictions and struggles within pre-capitalist relations of production. Brenner's work helps to fill in the details of what Wood -- following Marx -- stresses is the crucial condition necessary for capitalism: the divorce of the actual producers from their conditions of reproduction, an historical transformation that is simultaneously economic, social and political. Another source of error in interpreting historical materialism lies in hanging too heavy a theoretical load on the metaphor of "base and superstructure," which Wood says was always more trouble than it was worth because it suggests separate self-enclosed spheres. This was worsened by Stalinist mechanical, usually technological, determinism. The standard alternative to mechanical determinist interpretations, however, was a vague humanism. E.P. Thompson's work is often portrayed as an example of the latter, but Wood sees him as her kind of Political Marxist. Wood argues that Thompson's work transcends these false dualisms, demonstrating that the economic is irreducibly social and political, consisting of human relations of exploitation and appropriation. [Thompson is most famous for The Making of the English Working Class, whose profound impact on a radical generation is recalled in tributes by Michael Lowy and Barbara Winslow, ATC 48, January-February 1994 -- ed.] Against Thompson's critics, such as Althusser, G.A. Cohen and Perry Anderson, Wood shows how his work consistently addresses the Marxist problem of how to give credence to both the logic of modes of production, and to human agency within the conditions set by those logics. The critics, she charges, are essentially ahistorical: They see no alternative to structural necessity except contingency, whereas Thompson sees "historical determinations, structured processes with human agencies." (78)